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Published July 24, 2013.

MONTREAL - The region around Lac-Mégantic is known for its lush forests, scenic mountains and starry skies.

But for many people in this picturesque corner of the Eastern Townships, the area’s most important local resource is its youth.

The town’s future depends on having young people to fill jobs, get involved in community associations and raise families, said Ginette Isabel, director of the Société d’aide au développement des communautés (SADC) de la région de Mégantic, a local economic-development agency.

The tragedy decimated the rising generation of Mégantois, dealing a devastating blow to efforts by the community of 6,000 to keep and attract young residents.

Concertgoers were packed into the Musi-Café, a popular nightspot, on July 6 when the train transporting crude oil jumped the tracks at 1:14 a.m. and exploded, killing approximately 47 people.

Many of the victims were in their 20s and 30s and some had young children, now orphaned.

“The loss of these young people is something that saddens us enormously,” Isabel said. “They were our future. We have been working for several years to attract young families. Now, we have lost so many of them, all in one night.”

Lac-Mégantic, 255 kilometres east of Montreal and just half an hour from the Maine border, is among many towns in rural Quebec grappling with an aging population, said Isabelle Hallé, director of the Chambre de commerce de la région de Mégantic.

“This is a challenge we have, and that we were already working on, because we are facing a population that is getting older and the exodus of young people to bigger cities, which is also a challenge,” she said.

Senior citizens (age 65 and over) accounted for 24.5 per cent of Lac-Mégantic residents in 2011, compared with 15.9 per cent for Quebec as a whole, according to the latest Census. Only 60.8 per cent of the population of Lac-Mégantic was of working age (age 15 to 64), compared with 68.2 per cent for Quebec as a whole.

The median age in Lac-Mégantic was 48.6, compared with 41.9 in Quebec as a whole, and 38.6 in greater Montreal.

The tragedy struck down some of the community’s most dynamic young leaders, said Pascal Hallé (no relation to Isabelle Hallé), 35, the president of the chamber of commerce.

“There was Gaétan Lafontaine, who died, who was taking over the reins of Exca (an excavation company), who was a pillar in the business community. That is a loss for the next generation of entrepreneurs,” Pascal Hallé said.

“There was Mathieu Pelletier, who was deeply involved in the high school, with youth and in sports in the region, who also perished and is also a great loss. You can see by the age group of those who died,” he added, “from 18 to 35 or 40, that we lost a lot of fine pillars (of the next generation).”

But Pascal Hallé said the goal of attracting and training young entrepreneurs and workers must now be put on hold because the most urgent need is to rebuild the town’s shattered downtown.

“This is an emergency situation. It is a crisis. It is a situation that even for us as a development organization, nobody has ever lived through before,” he said.

The most pressing issues in the wake of the tragedy are to find temporary quarters for businesses in the disaster zone and to create a new town centre, Isabelle Hallé said.

“Since we have no notion of the time frame for the downtown and the relocating of businesses that this will entail, the uncertainty is palpable,” she said.

In the meantime, business owners and workers alike face insecurity and loss of revenue.

“There are a lot of jobs that aren’t lost for good but they are on hold,” she said. “We have about 670 jobs directly affected by the tragedy. For a region like ours, that’s enormous. For sure, that is a huge challenge right now.”

While attracting youth has been an ongoing issue, Lac-Mégantic is better served than most towns of its size by educational facilities and social services. It has its own CEGEP, a branch of the CEGEP Beauce-Appalaches, which is set to move into brand-new premises for the upcoming fall term — a plan that has not been affected by the tragedy. It is also the headquarters of the Centre de santé et de services sociaux du Granit and the regional school board, the Commission scolaire des Hauts-Cantons.

But young people who want to continue their education after CEGEP must go elsewhere.

“They leave town to do university studies, in Sherbrooke or Montreal or somewhere else. And after that, when they find jobs in specific fields, like new technology, they don’t necessarily come back to the region afterward,” Isabelle Hallé said.

Economic-development groups have been working with local employers to lure young workers by offering attractive working conditions and touting the region’s wealth of recreational opportunities, including two provincial parks and the Mont Mégantic observatory, Isabel said.

“For sure, we attract young people who are looking for the outdoors lifestyle and who are looking for work. We have interesting job opportunities. There are a lot of possibilities for people with specialized skills,” she said.

Unlike many towns hit by the death of traditional industries, Lac-Mégantic still has a strong manufacturing sector, much of it based on local resources like wood and granite.

Manufacturing jobs account for 26 per cent of employment, followed by retail trade (16 per cent), health care and social services (14 per cent) and education (eight per cent).

Major industries include Tafisa Canada, which employs 325 at its 65,000-square-metre particleboard plant, described as the largest in North America.

Until the tragedy that destroyed the town centre, Lac-Mégantic had a lively retail sector, Isabel said. The reason local retailers have remained in business is that the town is too far from major centres like Sherbrooke for residents to shop there regularly, she said.

“We had a beautiful, diversified commercial sector because we’re far from those big centres, so we need to have all our services and our businesses locally,” Isabel said.

But just 54.5 per cent of Lac-Mégantic’s adult population is employed, compared with 59.9 per cent in Quebec as a whole and 60.8 per cent in Montreal. The town’s lower employment rate is partly a reflection of its older population.

Isabel said recreating the lively downtown core destroyed by the tragedy will be key to keeping young people in Lac-Mégantic.

“It was full of life, with the bars and the restaurants,” she said. “We need to work quickly to bring all that back to life so that young people continue to feel that the Lac-Mégantic region is a dynamic place where they want to spend time and to live.”